Anthropological puzzle:
When does culture affect behavior?

BY
JOHN SANFORD

Culture. It has something to do with appreciating art. It's
often cited when people discuss why Americans work long hours. Now
some scientists claim that orangutans have culture based on
evidence of "socially transmitted behaviors."

In
other words, the meaning of culture may seem clear enough when used
casually, at a cocktail party, but like a Seurat painting it
becomes less distinct upon close examination. And a sure-fire way
to provoke a heated debate among a group of anthropologists is to
make the definition of culture the focus of a conference. Melissa
Brown, assistant professor of anthropological sciences, did just
that a couple of weeks ago.

Held Jan. 24 and 25 in Encina Hall, "Toward a Scientific
Concept of Culture" brought together 24 scholars from across the
globe, including some of the world's most renowned anthropologists
and biologists, to try to make sense of this enigma.

"Everybody talks about 'culture' these days -- e.g., grad
student culture mentioned in the Daily, corporate culture in
general and of specific businesses, and of course French culture or
Chinese culture or Korean culture," Brown said. "However, it is not
really clear what people mean by culture -- if we say that culture
is what people do and what people do is their culture, then we have
not explained anything really."

Most scientists acknowledge that, besides culture, many things
influence behavior, including psychological, genetic and
environmental factors. Brown said her inspiration for organizing
the conference was the hope that, through cross-disciplinary
analyses of these various influences, it would be possible "to
formulate a concept of culture that is clear, bounded, built on
cumulative knowledge and hopefully more easily empirically
verifiable."

The
majority of the conference-goers subscribed to an increasingly
popular theory about the way in which culture and biology interact
in evolution. That theory, co-evolution, holds that culture,
defined as socially learned information, plays a key role in
Darwinian evolution.

In
the first talk of the conference, Professor Peter Richerson of the
Environmental Science and Policy Department at the University of
California-Davis expounded on this. Richerson presented a paper
co-written with anthropology Professor Robert Boyd of the
University of California-Los Angeles in which they assert that "if
we think of culture as a part of human biology and as something
that evolves in a broadly Darwinian manner, then evolutionary
theory should play its accustomed role in the special case of our
rather odd species."

Citing the theory that much of the variation in human behavior
is acquired through teaching and imitation, Richerson and Boyd
assert that "cultural differences have arisen by processes of
cultural evolution that are crudely similar to organic evolution,
though by no means identical."

The
next speaker, Stanford Professor Arthur Wolf, the David and Lucile
Packard Foundation Professor in Human Biology, made a somewhat more
provocative argument: that culture -- conceived of as ideas --
doesn't matter much when it comes to determining human behavior.
Indeed, Wolf asserted that "to try to account for human behavior in
terms of ideas -- singly or aggregated as culture -- is a serious
mistake. Ideas are the small end of the ontological
stick."

As
evidence, he referred to research he conducted from 1957 to 1960 in
a small Chinese village, where he studied mothers' and children's
attitudes toward aggression. The mothers, he found, "were
obsessively concerned to keep their children from fighting with
their neighbors' children."

"Of
41 mothers who were asked if they ever encouraged their children to
fight back, only five said that they would ever tell a child to do
such a thing," he said.

Wolf also said he found it difficult to get children "to admit
that there was any circumstance under which they would hit or curse
another child." This was in striking contrast to American
schoolchildren who were asked the same set of questions in English.
"Sixty percent of the American children said they would hit a child
who hit them hard as compared with only 17.9 percent of the Chinese
children," Wolf said.

However, when he examined the actual behavior of the Chinese
children, he found their "retaliatory rate" was even higher than
that of a group of American children who were subjects of another
similar study.

"The striking fact is that the Chinese, who were unwilling to
admit that they ever fought back, were actually more likely to do
so than the Americans who claimed that they always gave as good as
they got," Wolf said. "My point is simply that for whatever reason,
the ideas that children are taught do not have much influence on
their behavior. The most one can teach children about aggression is
what, ideally, they ought to do. This affects what they say but not
what they do."

The
final speaker of the first session also caused a stir. Anthropology
Professor Robert Borofsky of Hawaii Pacific University asserted the
notion that anthropologists, on the whole, have not achieved
a scientific study of culture. He noted that most anthropology
textbooks define culture in largely the same way -- that is, as
behaviors and characteristics shared within a group. Meanwhile,
many anthropologists also emphasize diversity within groups, he
said.

"But here is what surprises: Few people carry out such
comprehensive studies -- at least to my knowledge -- to see what
cultural sharing occurs in which contexts," Borofsky said. "One
might suspect there would be massive studies given intra-cultural
diversity undermines a basic anthropological concept -- culture as
sharing."

Science should, in the spirit of Foucault, speak truth to
power -- that is, challenge accepted or expedient theories and
concepts, he said. To be taken seriously, scientific results should
be able to withstand the test of replication. Yet few
anthropologists try to repeat, or even investigate, the work of
their peers, Borofsky said.

"In
the abstract, many anthropologists affirm sharing of beliefs,
behaviors -- or what have you -- constitute a key element of
culture," Borofsky said. "And, in recognizing that the world is a
messy place, many also acknowledge that perhaps cultural sharing is
less pervasive, more problematic, than is generally asserted. But
then no one really seems to care; few seriously investigate the
issue."

Brown, who said she was pleased with the ideas and debates
that emerged from the conference, plans to collect the various
papers in a book, which she wants to submit to a publisher by the
end of this academic year.

Her
most recent book, Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture,
Power and Migration on Changing Identities, is being published
by the University of California Press. It is due out in
November.